Opinion
Well, the spy boss still won’t tell Australians who the “traitor” who sat in Parliament is, but he’s at least graciously condescended to admit who he was spying for. Hold your breath, readers, it’s going to come as a shock.
China’s leading spy agency has been revealed as the organisation behind the sustained targeting of Australians detailed by the nation’s spy chief in his annual threat assessment.
The Age
No! Whodathunkit! Well, I never!
Thank you, Captain Obvious. Does he really expect us to act surprised, here?
The only thing shocking about the political firestorm that erupted after ASIO boss Mike Burgess described a years-old case of an unnamed politician turned traitor is that anyone in Canberra was actually shocked.
A more sensible debate may have focused on why Burgess didn’t use last month’s annual national security threat assessment to describe more recent cases of attempted political infiltration or identify the agency most often responsible, China’s Ministry of State Security.
The Age
Hmm. Now, which party was known to receive literal shopping bags full of cash from Chinese donors? Which party was the CCP actively backing in Australian elections?
Answer those correctly, and you might begin to guess why a Canberra public servant is being so coy.
In an exclusive interview with this masthead and 60 Minutes, ASIO Director General Mike Burgess has separately hit back at calls for him to identify the “traitor” ex-politician who he accused of betraying the nation in last week’s threat assessment […]
Prior to the passage of new foreign interference and spying laws in 2018, suspected agents and proxies of the MSS and other Chinese intelligence and influence agencies sought to aggressively cultivate influential and senior coalition and Labor figures as well as party up-and-comers, including the now former Labor state politician Ernest Wong.
Chinese intelligence operatives were caught by ASIO interacting with the unwitting politician and community leader while he sat in the NSW upper house. It is not suggested that Wong is the unnamed person Burgess claims sold out Australia sometime prior to 2018 […]
Prior to 2018, the MSS and other Chinese government security and influence agencies exploited weak laws and naivety about their operations in Australia to invite influential Labor and coalition figures, journalists and academics to conferences in China and events in Australia while also entrenching proxies in a range of sectors, including certain Australian Chinese language media outlets, universities and the casino junket trade.
As if any of this is supposed to surprise us. We need only consider how furiously the University of Queensland, with its CCP-linked “Confucius Institute”, persecuted its own student, Drew Pavlou, after he criticised the Chinese government. Or how Australian universities did everything they could to circumvent Covid-era restrictions on Chinese students entering the country.
Not to mention how so many politicians were and are in China’s pockets. Former PM Paul Keating sits on the board of a China-owned bank. Former Labor NSW Premier Bob Carr has had his snout in every trough from the Boao Forum for Asia, the Australia-China Relations Institute (of which he was director), to being a China consultant for Macquarie Bank.
As it happens the Australia-China Relations Institute was funded by one Huang Xiangmo.
Businessman and political donor Huang Xiangmo, a property developer blocked from returning to his home in Australia in early 2019 after ASIO concluded that the Chinese national was engaged in suspected foreign interference on behalf of Beijing, remains the most prominent example of how an alleged Chinese Communist Party proxy could so easily cultivate deep ties to Labor and coalition figures. Huang’s expulsion from Australia came after a seismic change in awareness of the Chinese government’s covert, malign local activities.
Huang rose to particular notoriety when former Labor senator and power-broker, Sam Dastyari, scurried to his Sydney house to warn him that his phone was likely bugged by security agencies.
But the 2018 foreign interference laws haven’t stopped China’s spying and influence-buying, even if they’ve made it less blatantly obvious.
Alex Joske, a leading Australian scholar on Chinese intelligence and influence agencies, said the MSS pivoted with the backing of increased resources and technological power given to it as part of its mission to support President Xi Jinping’s global ambitions and power struggle with America […]
“The MSS has decades of expertise operating against Australia. Historically, its operations have been hidden through a veneer of academic or business relationships, and it’s difficult to systematically root them out. Once an Australian is inside China they’re on MSS home turf, where it has the greatest ability to use its coercive powers and surveillance capabilities.”
Which explains the never-ending China junkets for politicians, media and businesses.
Not that Chinese expats in Australia are any safer.
[Burgess] also revealed ASIO had uncovered former Australian police officers turned private eyes who had been unwittingly working for foreign spies to track down in Australia.
“They’ve hired people in this country to take photos of the house [of dissidents and other diaspora targets], find out where they live, look at bank account details and actually even ask them how much money it would take to have severe action taken against that dissident,” he said, while urging Australian private eyes to contact ASIO about suspicious approaches.
“More recently, we’ve seen a foreign intelligence service use a puppet to find out about a person and ask, again, ‘Can we find a fellow Australian who will make that dissident disappear?’”
Burgess also revealed ASIO was uncovering cases of “coerced informal extraditions” by foreign spy agencies and in which Australians were forced to travel overseas after being told: “if you don’t come home, something will happen to your family members”.
The Age
Tell me again why we’ve made these guys our biggest trading partner.